Wow! This year during ChefConf 2019 I was awarded as an “Awesome Community Chef” by the Chef community!
For the past 2 years or so, I’ve been putting in a lot of personal time and effort to contribute back to the Habitat project, by way of the central core-plans repository. From here, I’m able to help maintain, update, fix and strengthen software that is used by countless developers and operators around the world. If feels great to be able to give back to a project that I see a bright future in, and one that I’ve come to rely on both personally and professionally for application deployment.
Getting into Habitat was difficult to begin with. A couple of years ago, documentation was lacking and the direction was not clear. There was also a great amount of confusion around how Habitat interacted with, or fit into the Chef ecosystem alongside their Chef Infra project (previously Chef client/server). This has changed dramatically, and today you can pickup Habitat very quickly. Chef has put a lot of work into ensuring the message about where Habitat fits in the devops stack is clear and concise.
After the initial draw of adding required packages to Habitat core-plans and updating older packages, I found myself learning more and more about libraries and packages that I’d used for years but knew very little about. A deep dive into projects using Java at work had me debugging libffi, native calls, and how the Java Runtime Environment is compiled from source. Stuff that I would never have been exposed to without the Habitat project. Through the contributions to Habitat project, I’ve become a better developer, a better engineer, and a better operator.
I put in work and effort into core-plans development for the passion, and to learn.
It was an absolute delight to be honoured with the Awesome Community Chef award during this years ChefConf. Thanks, Chef Community!